Six months after I posted City Paint 5.1 – Ironclad Tattoo Re-do, the artist, Shae Petersen (AKA: FiftyK), happened to stumble across my blog and commented on the photos. He also informed me that he had just completed another mural…and invited me to stop-by for a visit.

I hope you’ll forgive the bit of sun-flare in the first three photos. I managed to find someone nearby who allowed me into the fenced and locked property at almost noon on a mid-week day…so I couldn’t be choosy with the shooting arrangements…full sun overhead…shadows near the mural…anyway…I hope you’ll enjoy the images despite their flaws….

Shae told me that he had been commissioned by the Utah Arts Alliance to paint the Urban Jungle mural.

He said that it will be the backdrop feature for a new urban-art garden that will be constructed in the empty lot that is immediately in front of the mural. The painting is actually on a reception center building located at 615 West 100 South in Salt Lake City.

When I asked him about the theme and how much liberty he and Chew had in creating the mural, he said that they were essentially told to use their discretion and make it however they wanted to.

Shae told me that he and another artist, Chew, the owner of Mark’s Ark combined their talents to create the mural that they have named “Urban Jungle.”

Thank you for spending a bit of your day with me. I hope you enjoyed the fantastically colored and skillfully rendered mural as much as I did. If you’d like to view more of the City Paint Series, as well as other tidbits of street art and graffiti that I’ve found in the Salt Lake City area, you can scroll to the bottom of the page, find the “Categories” widget, and then click on “Street Art – Graffiti.”

I can’t imagine that there’s much more work to be done in completing this mural…but then again, I’m not the artist, so I can’t fairly judge what else he/she/they might have planned. You can click on these earlier posts’ titles to see the progress that’s been made since the beginning of the work…City Paint 6.1 – Becoming, and City Paint 6.2 – Progress Report on “Becoming,” or you can scroll to the bottom of the page and select the “Street Art – Graffiti” category to view the complete City Paint series.

It trickles and slides down a slate or travertine bed, held in its course by the same or different, or by siliconed shores of flame-colored copper pipes or pewter-hued stainless tubes, squared or not. It ascends heights and heights in rivers round of rubber or acetate or plastic somethings that are bolted and clipped and bound to wooden frames, primal substances joined again in processed forms, the outside brought within, wrought components of elemental peace. It jumps up, propelled or thrust there by motors quiet or loud, close or far away, tucked into a cabinet pool or beneath the spray in a basin bare, a basin bare or full of stones come from rivers away and worn in a tumble from a mountainside over years and eons and miles away. Wires bring life and form and motion to all, copper arteries in plastic coats in various thickness and color, loose and curled in their spooling or taut in their barely-reaching, as they were cut too short by a helper’s hand.

Life pounds quietly in this watery form, in its climbing and falling again, in its soft spray or gentle trickle down. You can hear it in that sacred room, your sanctuary away from life’s rush and static loom, those tiny waves rolling from above in tender cascades that bring peace from his hands to your home, from his heart to your life abode or enterprise or garden or celebratory hall. Those islands of craft and science in a sea of wakefulness and thought and design and calculating engineering and peace and satisfaction that cause and stir a watery genius of art and science, they become substance and form in hours of concentration and delight in a dusty garage in a desert land, they live in those plastered walls’ confines, brought together in after-hours’ times and moments stolen from a day, born in the solitude of his heart and brain and sent finally across miles to live in some other realm, they come from gentle hands and rough, and a tender heart and torn, where peace is sought and restored in a blended liquid form of art and craft, and love.